Showing titles in Authors

The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing.

In this beautifully nostalgic memoir, eminent author Angela Thirkell recalls in rich detail the three houses in which she grew up. Focusing first on 'The Grange', where her grandfather, the celebrated painted Sir Edward Burne-Jones, set the cultivated tone, Thirkell also reminisces about her parents' home in Kensington Square and the Burne-Jones' seaside retreat, where Angela's cousin, Rudyard Kipling, lived across the green.

Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. Here he takes us through his chaotic school days, his attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood.

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding shelter in her imagination, a deep spiritual life, and connection with the natural world. She attended an Indian arts boarding school, where she nourished an appreciation for painting, music, and poetry; gave birth while still a teenager; and struggled on her own as a single mother, eventually finding her poetic voice.

Victoria Hislop joins Gabriel Fleming in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest novel.

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.

Best-selling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South.

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself." So wrote C. S. Lewis of George MacDonald, the Scottish pastor and novelist who had a profound impact on Lewis' own literary and spiritual career. Here Lewis gathers 365 of MacDonald's most inspirational lines, prefacing them with details of the effects MacDonald had on Lewis himself.

Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A Sort of Life, Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929.

The subtitle of this wonderful memoir declares its contents: this is 'my life with Harold Pinter', not Lady Antonia Fraser's complete life, and certainly not his. In essence, this is a love story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between. The result is a marvellously insightful testimony to modern literature's most celebrated marriage.

Edna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet from such adversities he wrote works 'to bestir the hearts of men and angels'. The journey begins with Joyce the arrogant youth, his lofty courtship of Nora Barnacle, their hectic sexuality, children, wanderings, debt and profligacy and Joyce's obsession with the city of Dublin, which he would re-render through his words.

She was only nine when her world fell apart. The struggle to understand took a lifetime.In 1960s Bristol, Susan's family was like any other with its joys and frustrations, and fierce loyalties. Then tragedy struck and left a legacy that was to last a lifetime.Susan was only nine when her mother died. A year later she was sent away to school. She didn't want to go, and didn't understand why she had to. In her struggle to cope with an uncertain world - a world where nothing seemed to make sense any more....

Lucy Worsley visits the Audible Studios to talk about her new book, Jane Austen at Home. Lucy is a historian, an author, a TV presenter and chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She has fronted programmes including The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain and A Very British Romance, and she copresented Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance. Her latest book, Jane Austen at Home, is a new telling of the story of Jane's life.

The daughter of a prominent Palestinian father and a sophisticated Lebanese mother, Najla Said grew up in New York City, confused and conflicted about her cultural background and identity. Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her.

Known to most as Lemony Snicket, the tormented narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler spends his days writing—for children and adults; film and television; and, on occasion, the accordion. Tracing his life in books from his first encounter with Baudelaire at a local library, And Then? And Then? What Else? offers a witty, poignant exploration of reading, writing and why we tell stories.

The Armies of the Night chronicles the famed October 1967 March on the Pentagon, in which all of the old and new Left - hippies, yuppies, Weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and intellectuals - came together to protest the Vietnam War. Alongside his contemporaries, Mailer went, witnessed, participated, suffered, and then wrote one of the most stark and intelligent appraisals of the 1960s.

Un fascinante paseo por La Habana con un guía de lujo, el propio Leonardo Padura. Los buenos novelistas siempre cuentan en sus historias con un personaje que acaba siendo tan importante como el protagonista: la ciudad donde trascurren los hechos. Por eso no hay mejor guía para conocer La Habana que Leonardo Padura, el autor que mejor le ha tomado el pulso, a lo largo de diferentes épocas, en cada una de sus novelas. Este libro ofrece un paseo por los barrios de La Habana en forma de historia autobiográfica del propio novelista, que va desde Mantilla hasta los diferentes barrios de la ciudad.

Josiah was 19 with the world at his feet when things changed. Without warning, the new university student's mental health deteriorated to the point that he planned his own death. His mother, bestselling author Amanda Prowse, found herself grappling for ways to help him, with no clear sense of where that could be found. This is the book they wish had been there for them during those dark times.

Depravity, redemption, terror, and spiritual deliverance abound in this physically and psychologically complex memoir from the front man of the pioneer punk band True Sounds of Liberty (TSOL). Spanning the extremes between hard-core punk memoir and handbook for recovery and survival, this narrative documents a youth rebellion that changed the world and offered life lessons rooted in 1980s punk culture.

Known for the wit of her writing, Catherine Cookson was the UK's most widely read novelist during her lifetime. When her Estate discovered this never-before-published memoir in the attic of her home, it was an astonishing find. Before I Go is the definitive story of her life, in the author's own candid words.